Facilities Planning for a creative company

This article presents a Facilities Planning project for fostering creative performance in the workplace of an IT developing company. The study of workspaces designed for encouraging creative and innovative outcomes in organizations is a developing field that still receives little academic attention despite the possible gains it can bring to workers and organizations. In order to address this issue we use a new approach for studying the design of physical environments that foster organizational creativity, combining the results of psychological studies on the impact of physical environment on creativity with the facilities planning body of knowledge applied by industrial engineers. Factories have been using plant layout tools for planning and acting on their work environment for decades now and it has been shown that changes in the physical work environment may have great impacts on process performance. By acting on the work environment of the company we believe that the developers creative processes can be boosted and facilitated. It is also shown that both industrial engineering and creativity research have much to contribute to each other and future research topics in the field are presented.